Coins We Love: Focusing on the Fun

To know me is to know that running a business isn’t my first love. I realize that and am not afraid to admit it. The coins are truly what energizes my passion. The stories, the history, and the beauty…that’s really the fun part. If you look at the display case in my office, you’ll see how these things intersect. And it’s not even coin-related stuff, it’s coin-adjacent stuff like capitol plastic holders from coins of yore, bottles from shipwrecks, a terra cotta mold of a Sacagawea Dollar, and the gold nugget hanging on the wall next to the fractional currency shield. All of these things are catalysts bringing us back to the passion of coins.

The past few months have been an incredible season that involved much planning for the future—growth and new projects—which overshadowed the coins. However, this week I’ve tried to reserve more time for coins just to bring the focus back on why we’re here. I’ve spent a little bit of time cleaning up the vault and the excess items that we’ve bought over the years that has very little to no value, to put together some groups of things to give to YNs at future shows, looked through the D.L. Hansen Collection coins that we’ll be displaying at the upcoming Tampa Show, and even spent a little more time combing through the raw coins we’ve been accumulating for grading from over-the-counter collections. Of course, I’m still very close to many of the coins that come through, though not as close as I’d like to be. But it helps to rekindle the fun a little bit. If you’re like me and don’t get to look at your coins very often, I encourage you to try it for a few minutes, even if it’s just looking through past images on our website of coins you’ve purchased. And if you can’t find an image, email us and we’ll see if we have it on our backend of the website. We understand that’s the fun part here and we don’t want to miss that.

One of my favorite monthly events is to attend our local Tidewater Coin Club meetings. Wes asks to go every month, so we make the short trip and it allows me to sit back as a collector for a few hours and I always learn something. This week I couldn’t help myself and bought a raw Seated Dollar that was a VF cleaned piece…I have to admit that the bug has never left me. But I am glad that I was outbid on the silver rounds that I really didn’t need. Coins are the fun part here. And we appreciate that.

Unfortunately, business management isn’t always that. As all small businesses, families, and grocery shoppers are seeing, there are expenses that are growing all around us. And it makes it harder to offer all of the services we all appreciate but sometimes forget about. As the bearer of news we don’t want to pass along, we’re going to be instituting small shipping fees next week starting Wednesday, August 28th. The costs of packaging, shipping, and insurance have skyrocketed over the decade that we’ve been offering free shipping and it’s finally reached a level that can no longer be ignored. So, while we won’t be treating shipping as a profit center at all, we will be instituting flat fees based upon the value and shipping time of orders. On the bright side, it will allow us to offer an increased variety of lower priced coins and we’ll be adding a few more numismatically-oriented items to the website in the near future as a result. While we hate to actually share this, it’s a necessary evil in today’s world and we hope that you understand.

Thanks again for reading and we hope that you enjoy this week’s Coins We Love!

Numismatically Yours,

John Brush

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